Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Aloha! I'm Back!

Whew!~ What a great ten days/two weeks. I have missed chatting with you, but Tall Guy and I went on a little trip to Hawaii, and I promised not to bring my computer along. It was a fairly easy promise to make with so much to see and do.

I'm busy sorting through the 500+ pictures I took, and I think they will be nice to share with you in the coming weeks as we tough it out through the cold months until April.

We started in Waikiki, where Farm Bureau held their national convention. Oahu is a beautiful island and holds such a special place in all our hearts with Pearl Harbor, but we really loved Maui, where there were far fewer people and more time to spend on the beach.

You have pictures of seasides, sunsets, flowers, whales (or at least whale parts. I'm about as good as taking their pictures as I am dolphins, thus no calls from National Geographic on my answering machine so far!), the many memorials of Pearl Harbor and other sites to look forward to in the coming weeks.

Right now I am trying to catch up on laundry. Besides the white load, there's no real rush for the rest of the clothes as we experienced about a 70 degree temperature drop on Sunday. :-P There was a welcome home party waiting for us along with a birthday peach cobbler for Tall Guy since he celebrated his b-day Thursday. Big Schmuck! I told him he was going to have to top that one for mine coming up. HA! (I know that won't happen, but it's all good.) The girls were able to spend the day home with us yesterday since we had not had any snow days, and that was great! What wasn't so great is that both of them and I started to poop out yesterday afternoon, and we were all running temperatures by the end of the night?!?!?! What the heck? The girls had an extra day with me today, but they seem to be on the mend and are working on homework as I type.

I hope all has been well with you. Please catch me up on any news I missed, and I will try to start catching up on reading your blogs as soon as we get back to whatever normal was/is.

Here's a sampling of my work in progress! Enjoy the warm sun-shiney vibes!

I love taking pictures from the air. You will get a whole lot more of these later!

The view from our room at Waikiki. That is Diamond Head in the background, and we took the time to hike up to its top one morning.

Our nice bellman took our picture after our arrival. We were soooo ready to crash and sleep!

These pretty little things were a nice treat at the end of the morning day or whenever ;-)

I am such a sucker of sunsets so I have a bazillion pictures of them to share!

The guy on the left must Gene Simmons' cousin???? The luau was very entertaining!

On a more somber note The Missouri (Mighty Mo) and the Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.

One of the many beautiful flowers on the island. This one is a Bird of Paradise.

Surf was WAY UP on the north shore of Oahu! The biggest waves of the year rolled in while we were there!

Ah Maui.... truly Paradise!

One of our many stops on our day trip on the Road to Hana.

That should be enough to keep you coming back for more. I will have to say that the most colorful sunset we saw was the one over the Wabash River as we made our way home. I missed the many colors in our sunsets. Now if I can just get used to the snow and cold winds........

I hope you all are feeling better soon! So nice to have you back, Lana, along with those gorgeous photos. I could get used to Maui really fast! We're supposed to have a minus 20 degrees includes wind chill factor tonight. I need a little Maui right now! Looking forward to more pics. Nice work.

how wonderful! it looks like you guys had a great time and the weather was gorgeous. i looooved maui, it was my fave island (though we only went there and kauai). next time i want to go to the big island.